


For Infinity

by Leyenn



Category: Toy Story, Toy Story 2 (1999), Toy Story Series (Movies)
Genre: Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-11-15
Updated: 2009-11-15
Packaged: 2017-10-02 23:20:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,367
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11788
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Leyenn/pseuds/Leyenn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>What happens after growing up.</p>
            </blockquote>





	For Infinity

**Author's Note:**

> Spoilerish through _Toy Story 2_.

There's a little park in the green belt, with a little grove of trees and a few old trash cans, and an abandoned swing set being slowly eaten, summer by fall by summer, by the creeping branches. It's a half a mile from Pizza Planet (except now it's a multiplex with a double Starbucks on the side), a twenty-minute drive and seven years from Andy's heart.

Behind the park is a storage depo for Al's Toy Barn, old enough to still have the name peeling over the door. Al's has been just another Toys'R'Us since September - just another part of everything that's over and gone forever.

It's mainly bikes and PlayStations these days, just the occasional box of the latest round of movie tie-in merchandising that Woody gives monthly warnings about at the round-up. He'll never be as good as Mister Spell, but he tries. Discovering that vampire action figures may as well be vampires with those teeth should only be done once - he still has the scars, right where his neck seams are wearing through.

Everyone seems to be wearing a bit thin, these days.

He misses Bo. Silly, since she wouldn't have stayed here anyway, and how could he begrudge her being passed on? A couple of years in the attic would have been nothing to him if he could have stayed in that house, in that family...

But Andy's gone. Gone to the big wide world of girlfriends and a Saturday job at Blockbusters and studying for college, and no time for playing with toys he's had since forever. No time even for toys like Buzz, or even the flashy rocket ship that arrived for his sixteenth birthday (and doesn't really match, no matter what Buzz says). Today Andy likes shiny round things with video games on them, and girls who move in next door named Beckie (she doesn't like cowboys: she's on the side of the Indians). He used to make the journey once a month, a long creep through the bushes in the dead of night and a peek through the blinds just to be sure, to be _sure_ that it was all still there, even if he couldn't be a part of it.

Last week the window was open a little way and he couldn't help but sneak inside, even though Buzz actually _yelled_ at him from the road not to. But then the desk wasn't there any more and he hit the floor awkwardly and there was junk on the floor he didn't recognise.

He doesn't need to look at it again to know the scratch is still there, dug into the paint and wood, straight through Andy's name. It's silly how he didn't notice it for days - until Potatohead hauled him off Bullseye's back and pointed it out, in fact - because of the other thing.

He knows now why Buzz didn't want him looking. And it wasn't the needing to let go, the way Potatohead insists he should; it wasn't even that it was a waste of time, like Jesse kept telling him.

Buzz didn't want him looking because Buzz knew that one day, one day, he'd peek through those blinds and find Beckie in his spot.

For three days now it's been raining. It rained on the way back to the warehouse, and by those trash cans outside, '$1 each' in Andy's scrawl was running streaks down soggy cardboard in the wet. It rained so much that his boots were all caked in mud and cola-flavored sludge from under the office window; so much that Buzz got water in his battery compartment and spent two days on emergency trips to the radiator to dry himself.

This afternoon Woody spotted him scraping at a spot of rust and pretending not to be afraid someone would notice.

Andy's old cowboy hat hangs above his head now, even still; he's tried ripping it down, but now there's just a nail poking through the felt and the rim is lingering against the floor. Now he has to stoop to get underneath and his boots stick out, although that hardly matters - he doesn't think he can bring himself to sleep under it any more. Maybe he'll let the Aliens have it instead, or the three monkeys they have left since the raccoon attack (he didn't think plastic monkeys were edible, but perhaps it depends).

Buzz is looking at him, thinking he won't notice it. He's been looking since Woody crawled out of Andy's window for the last time, and he's maddening in his concern. Woody can't ignore it, so it comes as some surprise to find him standing here, looming over this uncomfortable stack of video cases with his hands on his hips and his 'wrist communication device' flipped open, looking every inch the toy he isn't, anymore.

"Woody."

"Just - don't say it, Buzz." He ducks his head and scuffs his foot, seeking out a drip from the ceiling that's pooling water by his feet and cupping his hand under it. Water sinking into his arm is an odd, cold feeling until Buzz shoves him - hard - in the shoulder.

"I'll say what I like, cowboy."

"Your arm's open," he says, because he can't be bothered to explore his feelings and he knows Buzz won't go away.

"It doesn't stay shut," Buzz tells him. As if it wasn't anything important or the sign of a crippling disease, but it really is. Crippling to be stuck out here, lost toys, unloved, unneeded, unwanted. Suffering the rain, the wilderness, the days when someone else goes missing and no one will ever know where. _Forgotten_.

He should worry himself about this new little problem, jump up and panic and poke at it frantically and make plans for a sellotape mission when he can't get it to close: but that's the Woody who always rescued Bo from the evil Potatohead Gang, who slept on Andy's bed at night, and he can't remember how to be that Woody. Instead he shifts over on the stack of videos, hand-stitched denim smearing grime over _An American Werewolf In Paris_. Buzz sits down as easily as his action figure joints will allow, and Woody's imagination runs riot over scenarios of mouldy plastic and being slowly paralysed by the cold and the damp. That afternoon sneaking from the yard sale under an upturned box seems like years ago...

...and then he realises, it was, and they really might rot away forgotten here forever.

"I should tell you," Buzz says slowly as if his batteries are dying. "I have something that should belong to you."

"What's mine is everybody else's," he says quietly, trying to be funny and failing miserably. "The monkeys can have the hat, if you'll tell them. I think I'll sleep here tonight."

"On a pile of video tapes."

He swipes a hand through the dust. "Something wrong with my pile of video tapes?"

"Of course, I have a spare bunk in the ship," Buzz says as if his question were something else completely.

"Okay."

And then - then - Buzz turns sideways and kisses him.

On the cheek. But. It's a kiss, in the same way that the rain is wet, because the meaning is all there.

And it goes on for, well... what might be considered a long time.

"That was yours. From Bo. I've... had it a while now." Buzz doesn't sound convincing or convinced, but he lets it lie.

"A spare bunk, you said?"

His owner's name is scratched through, rain is soaking into his stuffing, and his hand-stitched pants are covered in grime, but for the moment that Buzz pushes an arm under his and tugs him up, he remembers what it was like to be Woody and Buzz - the Unstoppable Duo, Andy hooking their arms together and hugging them tightly side-by-side at night.

Of course, Andy's lying side-by-side with Beckie now, or some other girl (not boy, because Woody knew him at least that well). Woody needs to forget, or at the very least find out if a toy ever can.

He thinks about inside the rocket ship, the smooth plastic of lips warming his cheek, and wonders if Buzz just hugging him alone might be enough.

  


*

  



End file.
